Harvest Monday - September 17, 2018

Doesn't it figure that the minute I say that my elaborate rodent defenses seem to be effective that the damn critters prove me wrong. Fort Pepper was breached last week and I lost a couple of pounds of ripe sweet peppers to the effers. Here's what I rescued.

Odessa Market
Gogosar
Turkish Pimento

The unripe peppers above are a Gogosar, Turkish Sweet, and Polvadera all accidental harvests that I knocked off the plants. I don't know how the rodents figured out that the Gogosar peppers have the most seeds which is what they are actually after. They chew into the pepper leaving a pile of flaked pepper flesh and then totally clean out the seeds and leave behind an eviscerated pepper pod. They "harvested" twice as many ripe Gogosars than I did. Grrrr.

A couple of days before I found the breach I had harvested the first ripe Rosso Dolce da Appendere pepper and a number of Aji Marchant peppers. Aji Marchants are usually harvested underripe and made into pickles. It's a northern adapted baccatum pepper that seems to be quite happy in my cool coastal climate. I tried one of the peppers fresh and found it to be sweet and fruity and quite delicious even underripe. I'm looking forward to trying some of them pickled.

Rosso Dolce da Appendere is a large sweet pepper that is not dense with seeds so the rodents sampled a few pods and moved on to the seedier Gogosar peppers.

Rosso Dolce da Appendere

I cleared out the spring sown (April) Badger Flame beets. The really big ones push their tops out of the soil and the exposed skin becomes scaled and rough but it doesn't effect the quality of the flesh. I discarded the tops because most of them were either infected with powdery mildew or were home to a lot of aphids.

Badger Flame Beets

Last week Shawn Ann asked what a nematode infected potato looks like so here's a photo. The skin becomes bumpy and looks like it has warts.

Here's a side-by-side shot of a badly infected potato next ton a more normal potato. You can click on the photo to get a larger view. The potatoes are still edible but I do peel off the skin and throw it in the garbage rather than the compost so that I don't infect the compost with nematodes.

That's the latest harvests from my rodent infested garden. Harvest Monday is hosted by Dave on his blog Our Happy Acres, head on over there to see what other garden bloggers have been harvesting lately.